Making Search Social with Google SearchWiki

Google are now allowing users to annotate their search results and make their comments public as well as rearranging thesearch results.

First, a quick search for Outside5 Blog returns our blog:

Google Search Result

Clicking the speech bubble icon oppens a text box to add comments

Google Search Result with Text Box

Adding our comment and pressing “Make a Public Comment” shows our comment on the SERP.

Google Search Result with Public Comment

Clicking the up arrow will move that result to the top of your results, and the cross icon will remove the item from your results.

The Google Blog says that this function will not affect the google rankings for anyone other than yourself when signed in to your iGoogle account.

Tags: Google, SEO, Social

What are SEO Friendly URLs and why are they so important

OK, we have had a couple of emails following on from our post about how to use SEO friendly urls in Wordpress on windows server using isapi rewrite asking what SEO Friendly URLs are and why they are important.

What it means

SEO Friendly URLs are simply URLs that contain keywords related to the page content.

Example 1

For example, the URL for this page is http://blog.outside5.com/2008/12/what-are-seo-friendly-urls-and-why-are-they-so-important/.

the domain
(http://blog.outside5.com/)

followed by the year and the month of the post
(2008/12/)

followed by the title of the post with all spaces replaced with hyphens
(what-are-seo-friendly-urls-and-why-are-they-so-important/)

The original URL for this page would have been http://blog.outside5.com/?p=39 which as you can see says nothing about what a search engine should expect to see on the page, but our new SEO friendly URL contains all the relevant keywords for the page.

Real Life Business Example

A page URL using category identifiers like www.myshop.com/products.cfm?cat=29&subcat=11 may link to your mens (category 29) long sleeved t-shirts (sub category 11), but it doesn’t tell Google what the page is about; there are no keywords.  It is possible to rewrite the URLs to read www.myshop.com/mens/long-sleeved-t-shirts.

If you have a website or online store that is not performing well with Google, get in touch with us to discuss what we can do to help you out.

Tags: SEO

How to use Wordpress SEO Friendly URLs on Windows Server using ISAPI_Rewrite

The SEO friendly URLs in Wordpress don’t seem to work natively on a Windows server as Windows doesn’t support URL rewriting without addons.

You can download ISAPI_Rewrite 2 here.  Just install it and add the following regular expressions into the httpd.ini file:

[ISAPI_Rewrite]

# Wordpress Rewrites
RewriteRule /([0-9]{4})/([0-9]{1,2})/ /index.php\?year=$1&monthnum=$2 [I,U,O]
RewriteRule /([0-9]{4})/([0-9]{1,2})/(.*)/(feed|rdf|rss|rss2|atom|rss2_comments)/?$ /index.php\?feed=$4&name=$3 [I,U,O]
RewriteRule /([0-9]{4})/([0-9]{1,2})/(.*)/trackback/?$ /wp-trackback.php\?year=$1&monthnum=$2&name=$3 [I,U,O]
RewriteRule /category/(.*)/(feed|rdf|rss|rss2|atom|rss2_comments)/?$ /index.php\?category_name=$1&feed=$2 [I,U,O]
RewriteRule /category/(.*) /index.php\?category_name=$1 [I,U,O]
RewriteRule /tag/(.*)/(feed|rdf|rss|rss2|atom|rss2_comments)/?$ /index.php\?tag=$1&feed=$2 [I,U,O]
RewriteRule /tag/(.*) /index.php\?tag=$1 [I,U,O]
RewriteRule /author/(.*)/(feed|rdf|rss|rss2|atom|rss2_comments)/?$ /index.php\?author_name=$1&
amp;feed=$2 [I,U,O]
RewriteRule /author/?(.*) /index.php\?author_name=$1 [I,U,O]
RewriteRule /([0-9]{4})/([0-9]{1,2})/?(.*) /index.php\?name=$3 [I,U,O]
RewriteRule /feed/(.*) /wp-rss2.php [I,U,O]
RewriteRule /comments/feed/(.*) /wp-commentsrss2.php [I,U,O]
RewriteRule /about/? /\?page_id=2 [I,L]
RewriteRule /page/? /index.php\?paged=$1 [I,L]

The above rules will rewrite your urls to work with the following mask:

/%year%/%monthnum%/%postname%/

to output http://blog.outside5.com/2008/12/how-to-use-wordpress-seo-friendly-urls-on-windows-server-using-ASAPI_Rewrite

Tags: How To, SEO, Wordpress